An Essay on Criticism

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This early work by Alexander Pope was originally published in 1711 and we are now republishing it with a brand new biography. An Essay in Criticism was written in heroic couplet style, a moderately new genre of poetry at the time, and was penned in response to the debate on the question of whether poetry should be natural, or written according to predetermined rules inherited from the classical past. Pope’s most famous verse was The Rape of the Lock, first published in 1712, with a revised version published in 1714. As a poet he was deficient in originality and creative power, and thus was inferior to his prototype, Dryden, but as a literary artist, and brilliant declaimer satirist and moralizer in verse he is still unrivalled. He is the English Horace, and will as surely descend with honors to the latest posterity.